Continuing from here, what services would be a priority?
Keeping in mind our current time and resources. For example, while Premium Support would be great we really don’t have the resources to support it at the moment.
Is something like selling hosting/domains viable? If selling under ClassicPress name, taken out costs to manage and fair pay to people managing this the rest is ClassicPress monetization.
Also is it doable that a percentage of what people earn through job board functionality is given to ClassicPress? Like freelance portals that earn a fee on top of every service that is sold.
Maybe we can start with the job board monetization once it’s in place, then as we grow we can set up also hosting/domain…
Then we can expand from there.
Keep in mind, starting job board on the forums will give us time to evaluate and grow momentum. Professionals earning through forum jobs will have no problem to pay a fee when the real job board is ready.
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All of the “premium Services” including premium support should be viewed as a long term business strategy. Let’s start small and grow them as the community grows.
A hosted service with vetted developers’ premium themes and/or plugins as part of the service would be a start. Developers could be paid a small % on per active install as they’d take on the support aspect.
Vetted developers Job Board is another way to generate revenue. These professionals would take on tasks on small % of the support fee. Any of the services can be looked at from this angle and any incentive would be favourable to developers coming onboard.
As a former WordPress Theme Review Team member I know how deflating it is to volunteer one’s time without any incentives. Many a time the “paid reviewers” option ware tabled in order to retain members but shot down immediately each time - some of us reduced our volunteer time and other left altogether.
My point on the member retention is that this part should be a long term business strategy. These developers can quickly move on to be core contributor and thus move the project even further. Developers who build up to being core contributors will stay longer (my opinion) than those who jump in at the top only to find no incentive - long term vested interests are better than short term gains.
On other services such as hosting and related items for any business to have all these taken care of for them is a win arrangement - think web agency model but run by the company behind the core software.
I could go on and on but as I read back this reply seems to becoming more and more as disjointed assay 
so I’ll pause for now 
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What happened with an idea about an integrated plugin/themes marketplace in plugin/themes directory? Like Free/Freemium/Paid sections? It’s a win-win-win situation: stream of income to the CP, convenience to the CP users and a perfect solution to paid plugin/theme developers. If you charge a modest 20% for a transaction, it will be more than enough to fund not only development.
To compete with paid support providers, plugin developers, theme developers, hosting providers is a bad idea IMHO. They should be supporters, not competitors.
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Plugin Directory is a task scheduled for v2; focus so far has been on getting v1 finished and released.
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Yes, I know, but in the money related discussion I miss it. I think it is a great idea, benefiting all parties. And it is better to discuss about this source of money than starting to compete with (potential) partners.
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I’m sceptical of offering a hosted CP option. wp.com brings Automattic into direct competition with services like Wix, Weebly, etc. This is no doubt part of the motivation behind Gutenberg. As the site builder offerings have changed, the WP user base has diverged into two groups with very different expectations and the self-hosted WP users have lost out. If this conflict of interest between cloud-hosted and self-hosted code base developed in CP it would defeat the purpose of the fork.
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Conflicts of interest are definitely a thing we need to be careful of if we introduce any kind of premium service.
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Or, better, to avoid it all.
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Personally (i.e. even though it says Committee up there, I’m not speaking on behalf of the committee here):
I think this idea is along the right lines. Providing a centralized way to sell and update premium plugins and/or themes would be a big benefit to a large chunk of the community, at least the three different groups you mentioned in exactly the ways you mentioned.
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